When I did some work looking at the ability of the income tax system to affect income inequality, what I found was that incremental changes to our tax system are not going to have large-scale effects. If you want to change income inequality more through the tax system, it would be taking the revenues generated at the high end and focusing that more on low-income Canadians versus middle-income Canadians. That would actually impact income inequality in a greater way, but the effect would still be incremental because the tax changes aren't going to be....
If we think about the high-income earners, you're basically looking at about 260,000 people, and then transferring income to.... If you do it to everybody else, you're talking about 35 million Canadians, so you're not going to have any real, discernable impact. The more focused you get, the bigger the impact you're going to have.
The one thing I would stress is that if you really want to make a big difference on income inequality, it's not going to be through the tax system. There are an awful lot of barriers that are preventing people from realizing their potential, and it's getting rid of those barriers that will actually raise people up the income scale. It's not the tax system that is going to have the biggest impact on changing income inequality.